hello john.
On 2013-02-22 21:10 , "John Arwe" <johnarwe@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>Please read the few lines before the table. It should help with some
>context.
>http://www.w3.org/2012/ldp/wiki/ISSUE-32#Affordances
this is a great initiative. but i may be confused a little bit by how you
use the word "affordance." in the REST/hypermedia community, it refers to
links that allow clients to traverse the interlinked network of
representations. each affordance should be clearly marked as being
mandatory or optional, and it should be self-contained in the sense that
when choosing to follow such a link, all the client needs are the rules of
the media type, and the representation that contained the affordance, to
create a request that makes sense, protocol-wise. in some cases,
affordances have protocol-specific rules ("when finding an HTTP URI, do
the following"), but for simple retrievals, they don't need to be
protocol-specific at all.
some affordances may be "within the media type" (when you page, you expect
to GET a page, follow a link to the next page, and then what you GET
should again be a page), others are "exiting the media type" (when you GET
a media entry, it can be any media type, and clients cannot make any
assumptions about what they may GET). for those affordances that are
"within the media type", they establish the network of interlinked
resources a client is able to traverse when following the rules of the
media type.
cheers,
dret.